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Thursday, November 16, 2017

Watch A Crap Ton Of New 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' Footage

“I’m just so tired of all these Star Wars.” Okay, I’m not,
not at all. Nor did I have the titular line in Star Wars,
which has always chaffed. We’re now less than a month away from Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which I’m rather jazzed for. And just in case we
didn’t already know that, we’re at the point where Lucasfilm is beating us
about the head, neck, and face with promotional material. This includes a bunch
of new TV spots.

While the footage is similar across all of these previews,
each has a few nuggets of new material, enough to make them worth a watch if
you’re into such things. And they’re short. If you’re avoiding promos, good on
you, you’re stronger than I am.

Out of all of the new bits, it’s that exchange between Poe
Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and General Leia (Carrie Fisher) that stands out. When he
asks, “Permission to jump in an X-Wing and blow something up,” it cements his
status as the new roguish heartthrob of the saga. Like we didn’t already know
that. I do hope we see more from him in The Last Jedi than
in The Force Awakens.

I also dig the scuttlebutt that he’s such a
by-any-means-necessary kind of fighter that it puts him at odds with the
leaders of the Resistance in addition to pitting him against the First Order. It
sounds like he could easily become a new version of Saw Gerrera, who we caught
a fleeting, insubstantial introduction to in Rogue One. The
movie didn’t do much with him, but the ancillary novels dig into his background
as a more militant, aggressive wing of the Rebellion, one condemned and
ostracized by the main core. It isn’t hard to imagine Poe going down that road.